THIS IS NOT A SOB STORY.
Fact is that I'm the first to know that some kids had it much MUCH
worse than I ever did. I'm just telling
you a little about me and my upbringing, which looking
back on it seems very strange but I find it interesting none the
less.
The real question is: Do
you?
My mother got me though the classified ads in the newspaper. My
mother was barren, as was her sister my Aunt.
My mother was always jealous of my Aunt, and so to one up her, she
decided to get a baby before her. So my
mother placed an Ad in the local newspaper that said "Will care for
child in my home". In those days it was
illegal to ask to adopt children in the newspapers, so there were code
words that many women knew. And those
code words were "Will care for child in my home". Most women took
that to mean "Adopt".
Several days later my mother gets a phone call from a woman who saw the
Ad. But as my mother was too poor
to have a phone, she used the next door neighbors phone number with
permission. The neighbor comes over
and gives my mother a note to call "Audrey". So
Audrey is called and asks my mother "do you want to babysit
or do you want a child for yourself?" My mother answers that she
wants to adopt. In a few days they meet in
some public place for an hour of getting to know each other.
Audrey decides that my mother would be a good
candidate to give her unborn baby to, which she would deliver in about
3 weeks.
On the day of my birth, my mother is called to come to the hospital and
pick me up. When she arrived, my birth
certificate was already filled-out with both my mothers and fathers
name. Audrey wasn't married, but my
father was. The same father that had produced my sister just 2
years earlier. A sister that I wouldn't meet
until about 23 years later. As my mother was ready to walk out
with me, my father was standing there and my
mother asked him if he would like to hold me before she left. He
said "No, because if I do, I wont want to give
him up". I didn't meet this man until I was about 33 years old,
and we are a carbon copy of each other. I quickly
learned that his comment to my mom wasn't sincere at all, just a
way to sound compassionate at the time. But
as we are alike in so many way, I perfectly understood that scene, and
I probably would have said the same thing.
So mom takes me home to her husband. To this day I feel sorry for
that man. He really didn't want to be a father
at that time and especially to a kid that wasn't his. But my
mother was a strong-headed woman who pretty much
wanted to wear the pants in the family, which is why she was married 8
times. Her husbands could only put up
with her for so long, and when I got older I understood why.
So now I'm adopted to a family that doesn't have a pot to piss
in. Mom and her husband Woody traveled around
a bit, with Woody looking to work from Georgia to Michigan. We
settled in Detroit. Highland Park to be exact.
We first lived in a small house that one night when I was 4, Woody
turned the light on in the kitchen and the entire
floor seem to move to the right. That's how many cockroaches were
in the house. That same year we moved to
an apartment building next to the Edsel Ford Expressway, which was
under construction. Woody is supposed to be
watching me while mom is taking nursing classes.
Not actual photo
We lived on the
second floor, and I decided to take a walk. I went downstairs to
the sidewalk where there were large Oak trees between the
sidewalk and the street. It was a warm sunny day and I sat down
with my back against one of those trees and
fell asleep. The next thing I know, I wake up to see the face of
a Black man. He's holding me in his arms, and is
standing in a line of people. That line extended from the
sidewalk to the doorway of our apartment building and up the
stairs. They had located Woody and turned me over to him.
Now, I don't remember this, but apparently he whipped
me with a belt which left marks on me. When my mom was giving me
a bath that night, she saw those marks and asked
Woody how I got them. He told her that he whipped me for going
outside while he was napping. She years
later told me that she got that same belt and started beating Woody
with it. That's all I know of that incident.
About a year later, we moved to another apartment building that was
across the street from the first Ford auto plant.
This was the plant that Henry Ford started his assembly line for the
first time. When we lived there, it had been taken
over by Chrysler. We lived on the 3rd floor and this is when I
started school. It was called Angel School, and I started
kindergarten there. Every morning we would line up on the stairs with a
nickel in our hands to make our order for
milk: Regular or chocolate. This was the year that the Micky
Mouse Club came on TV, along with the Soupy Sales Show,
which was a local show out of Detroit. I watched them every day.
(Soupy's show would never be as good when he went
national). One day we came home to find the door to our
apartment locked with the keys inside. So as we always used
the fire escape to enter the building anyway, Woody leaned over
the rail and opened a window to our apartment. Then
he picked me up and held me over the rail, 3 stories up and as I looked
down, it seemed like a long way. He sort of
pushed me through the window where I fell with a thump. I then opened
the door for them.
There were two more things I remember about living there: Highland Park
is a city within a city.
It was completely surrounded by Detroit on all sides, but it had its
own government, fire & police dept etc. Today,
it's considered one of the most dangerous places in America. I remember
a Halloween when at 5 years old at dark, I left on my
own to go Trick or Treating. My mom asked me if I wanted her to go with
me, and I said no. So there I am, in the middle
of "Detroit" all by myself on dark streets going from house to
house. I look back on that night and think "wow!".
Another time was when it snowed SO deep that the snow was up to my
armpits. As I stepped off the fire escape onto the
pavement, I almost disappeared from view. My mom was up on
the 3rd floor and she yelled down "do you want me to walk you
to school?" As I started pushing against the snow with my chest I
yelled back "no, I can do it!". I've always
been that way. Mom and I moved to Charleston and left Woody in
Detroit.
As I look back, I feel privileged to have live right across the street
where at one time they made millions of Model T Fords
Two of the things I'll never forget is watching
the first episodes of The Micky Mouse Club and the Soupy Sales Show.
At that time, Soupy (a WV boy) was local out of Detroit, and his show
was 10 times funnier than when he went national and they wrote most of
the scripts for him. In 1955 it was all Soupy, and you never knew
what was going to happen next, as it was live TV. Many of the jokes
were for adults, which is why he was so popular with both groups.
We moved back and forth several times from
Charleston to Detroit. Mom "sort of" wanted to get back with
Woody after she left him, but it never worked out.
The last time we saw Woody was around 1961 when I was 11. He was
living in another apartment building and he raised
parakeets
in his spare bedroom. He became friendly with the
landlords wife and kids, and they (the wife and kids) all ran off
together leaving the landlord to wonder what happened to his wife and
kids. Over the
next 25 years we received clues that Woody might be in Oklahoma, but
mom never really investigated it. Fifty years later
via the Internet, I discovered that Woody had become a police chief in
a small town just North of Tulsa, and was now
dead. He along with his wife (I must assume that the landlords
wife got a divorce from him and married Woody because she now had his
name) were both laid to rest together in a cemetery there. I hope
that Woody's life turned out better for him than it did with my mom,
because no one deserved my mom for very long. I'm not saying she was
crazy, just emotionally disturbed. She seem to be running all her
life, which is why we moved to about 28 different places by the time I
was 18.
So we now live back in Charleston where mom is from and has her mother
to help her out when possible. My grandmother
was a real character. They said she was half Indian and I believe
it. She looked just like the guy on the nickel. My grandmother
(like me) was the first to say you're wrong when you were wrong. So
when mom grabbed me out of the hospital, my grandmother was not happy.
After all, she knew her daughter and her "issues" and knew that it
would be a tough row to hoe with a new baby. While I was not on my
grandmothers favorite list, I WAS on my grandfathers. I only knew
him for a short period of time before he died. I lived with him and my
grandmother on the farm out on Dutch Ridge while mom was still in
nursing school. We had an outhouse, so in the winter they had me
using a chamber pot which I'm sure didn't help my relationship with my
grandmother.
I was given a Red Ryder BB gun, and one day I ran out
of BBs, do I started to fill the barrel with tiny gravel and sand.
About that time my grandmother told me to come into the house.
I'm 5 years old and didn't want to, but I went in very upset and my
grandmother told me to to "something". I cant remember what it
was but I refused to do it. This made her very mad and she started
towards me. I pointed my BB gun at her face and told her to not
come any closer. She did, and I shot. Little rocks and gravel hit her
right in the face, but thankfully she wore glasses. Anyway, now she was
REALLY mad! We both took off through that farm house like a bat outta
hell! I ran to the living room where my grandfather was sitting in
front of the fireplace in an overstuffed chair. I jumped up in his lap
with my grandmother only a couple of feet away. He held up his big
beefy hand and told her to "STOP! Don't you hurt this boy".
She stopped. That would soon be last time I'd see my grandfather,
as
he died of diabetes not long after that, and after we had moved
back to
Charleston.
I want to add here that my grandmother said something to me when I was
13 that I never forgot: "Your mother should have never got
you". To this day I've wondered how that affected me. Is
that the second that I never trusted anyone in my life to this
day? Or was it when my mom threatened to to drop me off at the
Davis Child Shelter when I was 7? We were walking on
Dickinson Street and I was probably raising hell about something when
at 4 blocks from the shelter, my mom said "if you don't behave, I'm
going to take you to the child shelter and drop you off!" And I was
actually scared that she would. Those two comments always stuck
with me. It was like "your next move may be your last with this
family.. so watch it!". But here's the thing: My mom loved
me, and later so did my grandmother. I didn't know until much
later that mom was just tired of my shit and said something that she
didn't mean at all. My grandmother on the other hand was like me
in that she said whatever was on her mind, and probably regretted it
later. The older she got, the sweeter she got and we had a good
relationship in her last years. I still wonder how those two
comments affected me.... if at all.
The next 10 years or so was mostly spent on Smith Street, although we
moved back to Detroit once, and several places in
Charleston
including Duffy St, Shrewsbury St, in an alley off
Pennsylvania Ave, and Elmwood Ave. Actually, it wasn't Detroit
but
the outskirts of Detroit, like Wayne, Inkster, and a fleabag motel on
the side of the main highway that led into Detroit. I was 13 then, and
just starting Jr. High. A beautiful school
called Cherry Hill High. It was a combination Jr High and High School
and had an indoor swimming pool. It was worlds away from
the old dark schools in Charleston.
They wouldn't get a school like that until 30 years later. We lived in
a nice little single story brick apartment in the town of
Wayne. But school was starting, so mom made a deal with a nurse
she worked with to move into the basement of their new
Ranch house near Cherry Hill High.
The basement was bare. It had
nothing but block walls and a laundry sink. We
had to go upstairs into their house to use their bathroom.
The woman's husband wasn't happy about that. He was even LESS happy
when
mom drive her car clear through the brand new garage he had just had
built. It was winter and mom somehow
couldn't get stopped, so she went in one side and out the other.
Needless to say, there was no car in the garage as he was at
work. I couldn't bring any friends home to my house from school
because we were living there illegally, but it didn't matter because
after mom crashed the garage, we were kicked out and wound up in a
fleabag motel on the side of a 4 lane highway leading into
Detroit.
It was winter as I said, the the motels parking lot
wasn't paved, so it was a muddy mess full of potholes. You should
remember that all during these times, I was alone while my mom went to
work. She always tried to get the 3 to 11 shift so she could be
with me at night. She never had enough seniority to get a daytime
shift because she never stayed in one place long enough. The last
thing I remember living at that motel was getting a section of hose and
stealing gas from other cars to put in mom's so she had enough gas to
get to work. Soon we left. and this would be the last time we
would ever live in Michigan. Meanwhile, I was changing schools
like some people change their socks, and was never in a place long
enough to make real friends. None of this seemed to bother me at
all. Not having a father, not staying put, not living like normal
human beings. I was somewhat a loner anyway, and as I grew up, I
realized that's why nothing bothered me. I was just as happy to
be by myself as with someone else. But I've never understood if I
was born a loner, or was that what I became from growing up by
myself so much.
We lived on Smith St. until I was 15, then moved to Elmwood Ave.
This was just a few doors down from Charleston General Hospital where
my mom worked. We lived in a nice large house with 2 apartments:
One downstairs where we lived, and one upstairs where 2 pretty nurses
lived. At that time, mom was now working 11pm to 7am.
This left me alone at night,but since I was 15, no problem. Or was
it? You see, my cousin Ricky who was 2 years younger than me and
from Chicago came to live with us because at 13, he got into so much
trouble at home, that his mom asked mine if he could live with us and
have ME make a good influence on him. Only problem was that it
worked the other way around. I learned from Ricky all the tricks of the
trade that had gotten him in trouble. We started with candy
machines. In those days these
machines were not electric... they were mechanical. This meant
that if you pulled the handle out just so far, and then
started jacking the handle real fast, every candy bar in that line
would fall out. Ricky was an expert at this and showed me
how. For 25 cents we emptied every candy bar machine in town. Then we'd
take the candy home... toss it all on the floor,
and lay down and make candy angels. (like snow Angels but with
candy).
As I watched too many movies on hot wiring cars, I
decided to give it a try with moms beautiful 19632 Chevy Impala
convertible. It worked. So several times a month, I would hot
wire the car and me & Ricky would head straight for Huntington on
the new I-64 Interstate. I would hold my gas pedal to the floor
and watch the speedometer go to 120 mph both ways. We never got caught
either. Of course these rides were after midnight so there was little
traffic on the roads back then. One evening, Ricky and another
kid was tagging along with me and we saw the back door to an office
building on the Blvd. It was an insurance company. Someone tried
the door and it was unlocked. We went all through the place, opening
drawers and trying to find something of value, but all we found was
some small change. So we left. I didn't take anything but Ricky
and the other kid filled their pockets with change and paper clips and
just the stupid stuff you typically find in an office.
Somehow,
and to this day I don't know how, but the kid that was with us got
busted. I cant remember how, and I cant remember who busted him. The
cops? His dad? No idea. But whoever busted him made him talk when
they found all that office stuff in his pockets. The first thing
he did was tell them that WE were involved and where we did it.
Next thing I know the juvenile cops are knocking at my door and
starting to question me about "the robbery". Of course I
denied everything but they didn't believe me because I had been in
their
sights for some time. You know... little penny ante stuff.
Nothing serious. Well, they had us, and arrested us, and took us to the
Dunbar Child Shelter where they proceeded to shave our heads.
Long hair was in fashion so I was the only kid in town that looked like
he had just joined the Marines. But it was a bigger problem than
that. Why? I had a ticket to see them Beatles in Cincinnati in a
week, and you can imagine what I looked like against all those long
haired kids. The only way I could sort of pull it off was to buy
a full Denim outfit that was popular at the time. It was almost baby
blue and most importantly, came with a hat. I had never worn a hat in
my life but I was willing to make an exception this one time long
enough to see the Beatles. (There's a story about my train trip
to Cincinnati and back but I'll save it for later. It involved
the railroad police bringing me home. Sound interesting? It was)
So now we live in an apartment on Morris
Street. Here I am 15 through 17. My best friend at
the time was Homer Spinks, but most people knew him as Butch. He lived
on Capitol Hill. We both loved guns and wanted to go hunting. But
there was no one to take us at 15. Besides, it was wintertime
now. I had just bought a 16 gage shotgun and wanted to shoot it
in the worst way. In those days, a 15 year old could just walk into a
local gun shop and buy a shotgun or rifle, which I did. But since
it was too cold to hunt, and I wanted to try out my new gun, I had an
idea. I gathered all the old clothes I could find and made a big pile
of them in my closet. About that time Homer came over. "What are
you doing?". I'm
going to test my new shotgun
I said. "Where?" Right here.... watch! So I aim
at the pile of clothes and BOOOM! If you've never fired a gun
inside a house, you don't know what you're missing! "Let me try!"
Homer yells. OK... SHOOT! So between me and Homer, we went
through an entire box of 16 gage shotgun shells, but a funny thing
happened: On the very last shot, of which I took, ALL OF
THE CLOTHES DISAPPEARED. You see, we had shot so many times at
that pile of clothes, that we didn't know the shot was going through
them and THROUGH THE FLOOR. So now there's a hole so big in the
floor that you could crawl through it! How those clothes
managed to stay there without falling through before that last shot
I'll never know. There must have been one strip of wood going
down the middle, and that last shot took it out. Who knows?
But this hole will become handy in a couple of years.....
OK... here's where the problems really start
Morris Street was "OK", and it was easy to
sneak a girl into my bedroom because we lived on the bottom
floor. This girl was just a friend, no more, no less. She wasn't
all that attractive, but someone to run around together with. We
never had sex at this time. Can you believe that? Well.. it's
true. We came real close several times but stopped. (I did the
stopping.) Her mother found her missing from her bedroom one
night and figured where she was. So she and her sister came over and
pounded on our door. Mom was asleep, but woke up quick. As she met them
in the doorway, fists were being shaken. "Where's Debra!". Of
course mom had no idea. This actually happened twice. The first
time I pushed Debra right out my window. where she flopped to the
ground. There were hedges between my window and the sidewalk so I
figured she could hide there while her mom searched the apartment. (I
invited her to) But wouldn't you know it: The cops were
also out there and they saw Debra come out of the window.
BUSTED. About that time, my mom, her mom and her sister are all
out on the sidewalk yelling at each other. I'm not sure who
took the first swing, but I know my mom got the last one. She
didn't hit the girls mother, but her Aunt. More words were passed
and the whole thing ended... that night anyway.
Part 2
These "connections" contained. Remember that hole in the floor of
my closet? I finally got a chance to use it. So once again
Debra's at my house in the middle of the night, and once again her
mother and the cops show up. But this time I'm ready. I had
already told Debra what the plan was in case there was a repeat.
I lowered Debra through that hole in the floor which led to the
basement. This time she landed on her feet. When my
mom and I opened our front door, we both told them that Debra
wasn't around. I "think" we even allowed her to look in the
apartment, especially my bedroom. Once she was satisfied, she
left. That was the end of that. I don't recall us ever
doing that again.
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